If your marketing efforts aren't leading to sales, then something in your process needs work. To be successful, marketing must generate sales-qualified leads so your sales team has a better chance of converting those leads into new customers or in the case of senior living, new residents. Unlike the old days where sales and marketing were totally seperate departments successful companies are merging the two areas using technology. By getting a full view of how theses areas work together sales people can help in the marketing efforts and marketing can help in sales.
Integrating marketing automation with a senior living CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can help your senior living staff create a full view of your marketing and sales activities and better understand which areas need to be improved. Heres some of the basic advantages of integrating these two areas through the use of software tools:
1) Improved Transparency Across Teams
One of the biggest benefits to an integrated marketing and sales CRM is the increased transparency across your marketing and sales departments. Not all unsuccessful marketing should be pinned on the marketing team. The sales team needs to communicate to the marketers what happens to the leads they get sent. If a marketer generates numerous leads, he or she sees no reason to change his or her methods. If, on the other hand, the marketer discovers his or her leads generate very few sales, then he or she may need to change some of their marketing methods to better qualify those leads before sending them to their sales team.
When marketers integrate marketing efforts with a CRM, they can easily see what happens to those leads. In addition, marketing automation software can score each lead based on prospect behavior, which helps salespeople identify prospects that merit the most attention. By having full transparence across sales and marketing each team can see the activities that are driving results and which ones need to be improved upon.
*Graph showing the importance of marketing automation and CRM functionality in both customer acquisition and customer retention
2) Personalized Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Inbound marketing success depends on providing consistent value to your target audience based on which stage of the "buyer's journey" they are on. With marketing automation, your can differentiate your messaging to prospects based on what stage of the sales process they find themselves. You would, for example, not send the same promotional materials to an individual first gathering information on senior living communities as you would to someone who's already made a deposit at your community and is ready to move-in.
The ability to personalize lead nurturing campaigns originates from the ability to improve lead identification and score leads. Marketing automation combined with your CRM makes you more efficient at managing and nurturing leads, which in turn leads to more appointments, which leads to more sales.
"On average decision makers consume 5 pieces of content before being ready to speak to a sales rep."
-CMO Council
3) Engage with Prospects Across Multiple Channels
Senior living communities market primarily to two different audiences - seniors looking for residency and adult children looking for a senior community for parents. Within these two groups are individuals who interact through various media channels. Some prefer communicating via telephone, some email, some online, and some through social media. The ability to analyze this data and reach prospects "where they live" in these different channels greatly improves sales efforts. For example, a salesperson at your community might spend 30 minutes to an hour every day doing "social selling."
Social selling is about finding and engaging with new prospects online. Each time you login to a social media network and identify new prospects, connect with them and provide value by answering questions and sharing relevant content, you are participating in social selling.
By combining marketing automation and CRM, senior living sales teams better engage different audiences using their preferred channels. And better engagement leads to more qualified leads.
* Infograph from SuperOffice showing the difference between traditional selling and socil selling. As social selling becomes increasingly effective there will be a greater and greater need for an integrated sales & marketing CRM
4) Calculate your Return on Investment
With an integrated CRM marketing and sales are now combined and you can track marketing initiatives directly to an actual revenue number - a CEO's dream! With marketing data, you know which campaigns produce qualified leads that convert into actual sales and which do not. By linking marketing efforts to a real revenue number is enables you to track return on investment numbers in real time from your marketing department. It also allow a CEO to see which member of their sales team aren't converting leads as well as others.
With improved insight, you can now analyze results of different campaigns and "double down" or allocate more money into initiatives that are actually working. It enables you to make smarter decisions based on real data from your business instead of throwing up a billboard or radio ad and hoping for the best.
"The average ROI for a CRM system is $5.60 for every dollar spent"
- Baseline
At NextWave we specialize in creating inbound marketing plans that report on actual ROI. We track everything we do and constantly measure what's working and what's not. This enables us to provide fully transparent reports to our clients showing actual revenue we've generated as a result of our efforts. If you'd like to see what ROI you could expect at your community or business please fill out our projected ROI form - we'd be happy to put together a report showing which program of ours would result in the greatest ROI for your community.
